Environmental impact of fashion

One concern with fast fashion is the clothes waste it produces. According to the Environmental Protection Agency,[11] 15.1 million tons of textile clothing waste was produced in 2013 alone.[12] In the United States, 64.5% of textile waste is discarded in landfills, 19.3% is incinerated with energy recovery, only 16.2% is recycled.[13] When textile clothing ends up in landfills, chemicals on the clothes such as the dye can leech into the ground and cause environmental damage. When unsold clothing is burned,[14] it releases CO₂[15] into the atmosphere. According to a report from the World Bank Group, the fashion industry is responsible for 10% of yearly global carbon emissions.[16] In 2019, France announced that it was making an effort to prevent companies from this practice of burning unsold fashion items.[17][18] Fashion is produced at such high and fast rates, that more than 40% of fashion goods are sold at a markdown. [19]

The packaging of clothing also contributes to the waste produced by the fashion industry. As online shopping, both for clothing and for other items, has become common, the amount of waste produced has totaled about 75 million tons in the United States alone. Many packaging materials are also non-recyclable.[20]

Slow fashion is a movement that seeks to oppose fast fashion, focusing on the production and sale of sustainable clothing created with eco-friendly materials. The movement encourages purchasing clothing from local sources as opposed to large brands, as these locally-made pieces are often of a higher quality and will last longer than factory-made clothing, and will reduce pollution caused by the disposal of clothes.[21] The slow fashion movement also challenges the ethical issues of fast fashion, such as the underpaying and overworking of factory workers, who often come from low-income countries.[2]

Polyester was one of the most popular fibers used in fashion in 2017, found in about 60% of garments in retail stores and equalling about 21.3 million tons of polyester fiber.[22] There was a 157% increase of polyester clothing consumption from 2000 to 2015.[22] Synthetic polyester is made from a chemical reaction of coal, petroleum, air, and water,[23] two of which are fossil fuels. When coal is burned it creates heavy amounts of air pollution containing carbon dioxide. When petroleum is usedit creates several air pollutants such as particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur dioxide.[24] The creation of polyester creates pollution, in addition to waste from the finished product at the end of its life cycle. Polyester is non-biodegradable[25] meaning it can never be converted by bacteria to a state that will not damage the environment. Washing polyester clothing leads to shedding of microfiber plastics which enter water systems, including oceans.[26][27]

1913 image of cotton production in the United States.

Cotton is the most common crop in the world aside from food.[28] Half of all textiles produced are made of the fiber.[28] Cotton is a water-intensive crop, requiring 3644 cubic meters of water to grow one ton of fiber, or 347 gallons per pound.[29] Growing cotton requires 25% of insecticides and 10-16% of pesticides of what is used globally every year.[30][29] Half of the top pesticides used in growing cotton in the US are deemed likely to be carcinogenic by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.[29] Cotton production degrades the quality of the soil, leading to exhausted fields and expansion into new areas.[28] Expansion into new areas leads to the destruction of local habitats and the associated pollution affects biodiversity.[28]

Animal-based fibers such as wool and leather were responsible for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2005.[31] Cattle have digestive systems that use a process known as foregut fermentation, which creates the greenhouse gas methane as a byproduct. In addition to the CH₄ released from the ruminants, CO₂ and N₂O are released into the atmosphere as byproducts of raising the animals. In total, 44% of emissions caused by livestock are from enteric fermentation, 41% comes from the feed needed to raise the livestock, 10% comes from manure, and 5% comes from energy consumption.[32]

Energy use here is measured in megajoules needed to produce one kilogram of the given textile. Water use here is measured in liters of water needed to produce one kilogram of the given textile.

Plastic and synthetic textile are both created from a chemical structure called polymer. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines polymer as “a chemical compound or mixture of compounds formed by polymerization and consisting essentially of repeating structural units.” For plastic, the common polymer found is PET, polyethylene (PE), or polypropylene (PP), whereas for textile, the polymer found the most abundant in the collection of waste is polyester and nylon textiles.[38]

Textiles shed microfibers at every stage of their life cycle, from production, to use, to end of life disposal.[3] These fibers end up in the soil, air, lakes, and oceans.[3] Microfiber pollution has existed as long as the textile industry has, but only recently has it come under public scrutiny.[3] The Ocean Wise Conservation Association produced a study discussing the textile waste. For polyester, it stated that on average, humans shed around 20 to 800 mg micro polyester waste for every kg textile washed. A smaller amount for nylon is found; for every kg of fabrics washed, we shed around 11 to 63 mg nylon microfiber waste to the waters.[39] Washing synthetic textiles releases microplastics and microfibers into the oceans.[40] This type of waste is most commonly found from washing machine cycles, where fibers of clothes fall loose during the tumbling process.[40] An individual domestic load of laundry can shed up to 700,000 microfibers.[3]

The Association also released a study stating that on average, households in the United States and Canada produce around 135 grams of microfibers, which is equivalent to 22 kilotons of microfibers released to the wastewater annually. These wastewater will go through various waste water treatment plants, however, around 878 tons of those 22 kilotons were left untreated and hence, thrown into the ocean. For comparison, 878 tons of waste is equivalent to around 9 - 10 blue whales in the ocean. This is how much we pollute just from textile.[41]

Textiles are the main source of microfibers in the environment.[3] Thirty five percent of the microplastics that are found in marine ecosystems, such as shorelines, are from synthetic microfibers and nanofibers.[3] Such microfibers affect marine life in that fish or other species in the marine ecosystems consume them, which end up in the intestine and harm the animals.[42] Microfibers have been found in the digestive tracts of widely consumed fish and shellfish.[3] These fish are then consumed by humans, which leads to the absorption of micro pollutants in the fish in a process called biomagnification.[43] Predators of the affected marine individuals are also harmed, as they consume their prey who now contain the microfibers.[42] The yearly shellfish consumption of microplastics was found to be 11,000 pieces, and microfibers were found in eighty three percent of fish caught in one lake in Brazil.[42] Further, about two thirds of synthetic fibers from clothing production will be found in the ocean from 2015 to 2050.[44] In one study, the food consumption rates decreased in crabs who were eating food with plastic microfibers, which further lead to the available energy for growth to also decrease.[45]

Techniques to address the environmental impacts of the fashion industry include a marine algal bioabsorbent, which could be used for dye removal through rich algal surface chemistry through heteroatom containing functional groups.[46] Many techniques or potential solutions are difficult in their implementation, for instance the accuracy of marine sediment techniques to detect microplastics is not sufficiently tested among different soil samples or sources.[47]

Eutrophication in a water source

Clothing often contains non-organic, excessively farmed cotton which is grown with chemicals that are known to cause eutrophication. Eutrophication is a process in which fresh water sources such as lakes and rivers become overly enriched with nutrients. This causes a dense growth of plant life that is harmful to the ecosystem, such as algae blooms. Algal blooms deplete levels of oxygen in water as they decompose, resulting in changes to the ecosystem, either through the die-off of aquatic creatures or populations moving as water becomes uninhabitable. Algal blooms can also make bodies of water unsuitable for both human consumption and recreation.[48] Two of the main ingredients in pesticides are nitrates and phosphates, and when pesticides leak into stream systems surrounding the cropland via runoff, the nitrates and phosphates contribute to water eutrophication.

The fashion industry consumes a large amount of water to produce fabrics and manufacture garments every year. The global fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water per year, or 20 trillion gallons.[3][49] This is four percent of all freshwater withdrawal globally.[37] This amount is set to double by 2030 if it follows the current trend.[50] According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the fashion industry is responsible for 20 percent of global wastewater.[51] Manufacturing a single pair of Levi jeans, will on average, consume about 3,781 liters of water to make.[52] On average, to produce one kilogram of textiles will require 200 liters of water.[29]